A Policy Nightmare

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Sept. 21, 2024

Had enough? No, seriously, do you wish the 2024 election cycle was either over or would just go away? The campaigns get longer, uglier, and more vapid with each election.

Early voting, a benefit for most of us, has unfortunately created a month-long election day and even longer than normal campaign efforts. It has gone beyond simply annoying because the candidates will not leave us alone. Did they really believe that tenth or eleventh piece of mail would do the trick? That one last really good insult would finally convince me not to vote for an opponent?

And if candidates somehow believe that interrupting whatever we’re trying to watch or read online is a good idea, they are seriously mistaken. These are the modern versions of robocalls and are every bit as annoying.

The national campaigns are about as unpleasant as we expected.

In the middle of this unpleasantness is the much ballyhooed Project 2025. This is the work of the Heritage Foundation, a “think tank” formed in 1973 that is, according to their own website, dedicated to creating and promoting conservative public policies based on free enterprise, limited government, strong national defense, individual freedom, and their version of traditional American values.

The Heritage Foundation claims some 400 “experts” produced Project 2025 in 2023 as a blueprint for a conservative federal government not just for Donald Trump but as an effort to create a conservative government in perpetuity. Their “four pillars” are a policy agenda (civil rights, reproductive rights, and voting rights are not high on their priority list), personnel database (eliminate civil service protections from government employees then remove those not in agreement with their plans), training (it’ll take some time and effort to get the entire federal government to step in line), and a 180-day playbook (implementing the plan starts the second Trump is elected).

Trump claims he knows nothing about Project 2025 and it is not part of his plans for another administration. But 140 of the folks who put together Project 2025 worked either in the Trump Administration or on Trump campaigns, and much seems as if it was written to appease him directly.

Need more details? According to their own 922-page policy nightmare, in the first 180 days, the plan calls for eliminating protections and rights for the LGBTQ+ community; ending reproductive freedom as we currently understand it, including outlawing the so-called abortion pill; eliminating the Department of Health and Human Services and replacing it with something called the Department of Life; reducing or eliminating climate change and environmental policies by shutting down the Office of Domestic Climate Policy, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the Office of Environmental Justice, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), including the National Weather Service to name a few.

Need more? All right, how about slashing the budget of the Department of Justice and reorganizing the FBI by requiring loyalty to the president, eliminating apolitical civil servants and firing as many as 50,000 of them to be replaced by names on a conservative database, replace the Department of Homeland Security with an Immigration Department that can militarize the borders, remove the U.S. from international treaties and organizations, and ignore the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in favor of our own document that is anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion.

For those not of the hardcore conservative persuasion, Project 2025 is a horror story, basically the blueprint for a conservative imperial presidency forever. Even worse, it will require a subservient Congress and judiciary, both of which are part of the plan.

The hope is that people will at least go online and take a glance at the thing as it might distract them from what’s becoming a bizarrely dishonest campaign. We now have the pet-eating migrant story oozing out of Ohio. Oddly, it apparently hasn’t occurred to any reporter or campaign to contact the police and see if anybody has reported Fido being stolen or to provide, you know, actual evidence.

(Meanwhile, Trump ads are telling us that Harris is “dangerously soft on crime.” That should be fine with the Trump campaign, since their candidate is an actual 34 times convicted felon.)

The race continues painfully close with both FiveThirtyEight.com and RealClearPolitics
showing Harris with a small national lead, while Republicans attempting to regain control of the Senate enjoy a similarly thin margin. The former president has issues on which he could be running, but he always favors the more basic strategy of insults and name calling. Harris, with an improving economy behind her, is running to the middle as fast as her formerly progressive feet will take her.

Somehow, there are still around five percent of likely voters claiming they are undecided. Maybe a quick glance at Project 2025 and what one side of this election has planned for us will help make that decision.